The Status and Distribution of the Whooper Swan Cygnus cygnus in Russia II

Central and Eastern Siberia, and the Russian Far East

Abstract

Most of the range of the Whooper Swan Cygnus cygnus falls within the borders of Russia and the associated republics. Although most research on this species has been conducted in Europe and Japan, a growing body of work has been developed since 1980 in Russia. As this work has mostly appeared only in Russian, and often in local journals, the accessibility and availability of that literature to non-Russian scientists has been extremely limited, although Brazil & Shergalin (2002) have reviewed much of the literature that pertains to Western Russia and Western Siberia. Here we continue that review, providing an overview of the status and distribution of the species in two further regions: 1) Central and Eastern Siberia (from the Yenisei to the Lena), and 2) The Russian Far East (from the Lena to the Bering Sea). Each of these regions is as large, or considerably larger than the area occupied by the European population, which is currently the only region for which accurate information on population size is available.
The two regions addressed in this paper are characterised by large areas of potential Whooper Swan breeding habitat though the majority of the population winters beyond the borders of Russia. The breeding range extends east almost as far as the easternmost limits of Russia, in the Anadyr Valley of Chukotka and on Kamchatka. The northern limit to its breeding range lies between 67-68°N, and exceptionally north to 72°N, but whereas the breeding range extends south to 62°N in western parts of European Russia, it reaches as far south as 55°N to 50°N on Sakhalin and in Kamchatka. Whereas many birds from the western range winter south to 47-50°N in Europe, a large proportion of the birds breeding in Central and Eastern Siberia, and the Russian Far East migrate to wintering grounds in central Asia and eastern Asia, where the southernmost wintering Whooper Swans are in Japan. There, for climatic reasons, they can be found in large numbers at latitudes as low as between 35°N to 40°N.
Published population estimates vary enormously for Central and Eastern Siberia, however, the population of the Russian Far East is thought to be more reliably in the region of 60, 000 birds based on numbers wintering in Kamchatka, Japan, the Korean Peninsula and China.